Feels like home…

I guess you could say we’re pretty familiar with church. Christine and I have been pastors and church planters for over 30 years. Both of our parents were pastors and church planters. That’s over 100 years of doing church as a way of life between us. Ehemm, er, well Christine is only about 39ish… just trust me, the math works.

In that time we’ve been in just about every kind of church setting. My mom and dad were part of a very prominent evangelical denomination. Christine’s parents are in a traditional pentecostal denomination. We’ve been in high church liturgical settings, charismatic free-for-alls (fire tunnels and the works) home churches in the 70’s and 80’s, renewal movements, even a spirit-filled reformed missional church planting movement (not sure what that even means). We’ve shouted, laughed, cried, rolled, run, sweat, pressed in, and tarried. And it’s all been good!

Several years ago we took a sabbatical from ministry after experiencing ministry fatigue and burnout. We needed rest and, simultaneously, longed for more. While learning to rest and lean into the Father’s heart, we began to see decades of old patterns of striving in a performance mindset break. And as we learned to be still, new thoughts emerged!

Over the past year we’ve sensed the Lord speaking to us about church from a different perspective. We’ve heard Him speak so tenderly about His bride, how He desires to reveal His glory through her. And in these conversations we’ve seen a pattern emerge, a blueprint of sorts, involving organic, relational small gatherings, genuinely sharing their lives together. Gatherings that are a safe place to grow and struggle, to challenge and be challenged, and bear one another's burdens. A missional community that values the Greatest Commandments and the Great Commission above all else, and strives to fulfill, with the Father’s intentionality and tenderness, the ministry of reconciliation.

Acts 2: 44-47

And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common… Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.

The New Testament church was primarily concerned with caring for one another. Their love and sacrificial care for each other was the hallmark of the way of the radical rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. Their gatherings were safe places of knowing and being known, where they would share a meal, encourage one another in the teachings of the Apostles, and rejoice in the miraculous wonders that were becoming part of their everyday lives! In other words, the gatherings felt like home to them.

From this place of security and identity, the disciples of Jesus spilled into the streets and into their everyday lives overflowing with the presence and power of their Father and God added to them daily those who were being saved. The power and authority of the Living Word marked their lives and the priesthood of all believers, not just a few professional clergy, bore the kind of fruit Jesus talked about in John 15:

John 15:5-11

 I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing…Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.

The world needs a church like that, for the Body of Christ to be the glorious bride that Jesus gave His life for. An abiding people of contagious joy who live from the presence of God, and for His love to be revealed through His sons and daughters who are confident in their priesthood and secure in their community of faith. A family who warmly and without reservation welcomes those who are lost and without hope into a place that feels like home!

David